The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud
Act. i. sc. 2. Translated by George Somers Clark.
Footnote CD: Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_, is founded on the same basis as the _Oedipus_. But the whole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilisation—the age-long progress of repression in the emotional life of humanity—is made manifest in the changed treatment of the identical material. In _Oedipus_ the basic wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realised as it is in the dream; in _Hamlet_ it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence—somewhat as in the case of a neurosis—only by the inhibition which results from it. The fact that it is possible to remain in complete darkness concerning the character of the hero, has curiously shown itself to be consistent with the overpowering effect of the modern drama. The play is based upon Hamlet’s hesitation to accomplish the avenging task which has been assigned to him; the text does not avow the reasons or motives of this hesitation, nor have the numerous attempts at interpretation succeeded in giving them. According to the conception which is still current to-day, and which goes back to Goethe, Hamlet represents the type of man whose prime energy is paralysed by over-development of thought activity. (“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”)
According to others the poet has attempted to portray a morbid, vacillating character who is subject to neurasthenia. The plot of the story, however, teaches us that Hamlet is by no means intended to appear as a person altogether incapable of action. Twice we see him asserting himself actively, once in headlong passion, where he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, and on another occasion where he sends the two courtiers to the death which has been intended for himself—doing this deliberately, even craftily, and with all the lack of compunction of a prince of the Renaissance. What is it, then, that restrains him in the accomplishment of the task which his father’s ghost has set before him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet can do everything but take vengeance upon the man who has put his father out of the way, and has taken his father’s place with his mother—upon the man who shows him the realisation of his repressed childhood wishes. The loathing which ought to drive him to revenge is thus replaced in him by self-reproaches, by conscientious scruples, which represent to him that he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is to punish.
I have thus translated into consciousness what had to remain unconscious in the mind of the hero; if some one wishes to call Hamlet a hysteric subject I cannot but recognise it as an inference from my interpretation. The sexual disinclination which Hamlet expresses in conversation with Ophelia, coincides very well with this view—it is the same sexual disinclination which was to take possession of the poet more and more during the next few years of his life, until the climax of it is expressed in _Timon of Athens_. Of course it can only be the poet’s own psychology with which we are confronted in _Hamlet_; from a work on Shakespeare by George Brandes (1896), I take the fact that the drama was composed immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father—that is to say, in the midst of recent mourning for him—during the revival, we may assume, of his childhood emotion towards his father. It is also known that a son of Shakespeare’s, who died early, bore the name of Hamnet (identical with Hamlet). Just as _Hamlet_ treats of the relation of the son to his parents, _Macbeth_, which appears subsequently, is based upon the theme of childlessness.
Just as every neurotic symptom, just as the dream itself, is capable of re-interpretation, and even requires it in order to be perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation. I have here attempted to interpret only the most profound group of impulses in the mind of the creative poet. The conception of the _Hamlet_ problem contained in these remarks has been later confirmed in a detailed work based on many new arguments by Dr. Ernest Jones, of Toronto (Canada). The connection of the _Hamlet_ material with the “Mythus von der Geburt des Helden” has also been demonstrated by O. Rank.—“The _Oedipus_ Complex as an Explanation of _Hamlet’s_ Mystery: a Study in Motive” (_American Journal of Psychology_, January 1910, vol. xxi.). Footnote CE: Likewise, anything large, over-abundant, enormous, and exaggerated, may be a childish characteristic. The child knows no more intense wish than to become big, and to receive as much of everything as grown-ups; the child is hard to satisfy; it knows no _enough_, and insatiably demands the repetition of whatever has pleased it or tasted good to it. It learns to practise moderation, to be modest and resigned, only through culture and education. As is well known, the neurotic is also inclined toward immoderation and excess.
_I recently dreamed that I went to the dentist who drilled out one of my back teeth in the lower jaw. He worked so long at it that the tooth became useless. He then grasped it with the forceps, and pulled it out with such perfect ease that it astonished me. He said that I should not care about it, as this was not really the tooth that had been treated; and he put it on the table where the tooth (as it seems to me now an upper incisor) fell apart into many strata. I arose from the operating chair, stepped inquisitively nearer, and, full of interest, put a medical question. While the doctor separated the individual pieces of the strikingly white tooth and ground them up (pulverised them) with an instrument, he explained to me that this had some connection with puberty, and that the teeth come out so easily only before puberty; the decisive moment for this in women is the birth of a child. I then noticed (as I believe half awake) that this dream was accompanied by a pollution which I cannot however definitely place at a particular point in the dream; I am inclined to think that it began with the pulling out of the tooth._
_I then continued to dream something which I can no longer remember, which ended with the fact that I had left my hat and coat somewhere (perhaps at the dentist’s), hoping that they would be brought after me, and dressed only in my overcoat I hastened to catch a departing train. I succeeded at the last moment in jumping upon the last car, where someone was already standing. I could not, however, get inside the car, but was compelled to make the journey in an uncomfortable position, from which I attempted to escape with final success. We journeyed through a long tunnel, in which two trains from the opposite direction passed through our own train as if it were a tunnel. I looked in as from the outside through a car window._ As material for the interpretation of this dream, we obtained the following experiences and thoughts of the dreamer:— I. For a short time I had actually been under dental treatment, and at the time of the dream I was suffering from continual pains in the tooth of my lower jaw, which was drilled out in the dream, and on which the dentist had in fact worked longer than I liked. On the forenoon of the day of the dream I had again gone to the doctor’s on account of the pain, and he had suggested that I should allow him to pull out another tooth than the one treated in the same jaw, from which the pain probably came. It was a ‘wisdom tooth’ which was just breaking through. On this occasion, and in this connection, I had put a question to his conscience as a physician.
II. On the afternoon of the same day I was obliged to excuse myself to a lady for my irritable disposition on account of the toothache, upon which she told me that she was afraid to have one of her roots pulled, though the crown was almost completely gone. She thought that the pulling out of eye teeth was especially painful and dangerous, although some acquaintance had told her that this was much easier when it was a tooth of the lower jaw. It was such a tooth in her case. The same acquaintance also told her that while under an anæsthetic one of her false teeth had been pulled—a statement which increased her fear of the necessary operation. She then asked me whether by eye teeth one was to understand molars or canines, and what was known about them. I then called her attention to the vein of superstitions in all these meanings, without however, emphasising the real significance of some of the popular views. She knew from her own experience, a very old and general popular belief, according to which _if a pregnant woman has toothache she will give birth to a boy_.
III. This saying interested me in its relation to the typical significance of dreams of dental irritation as a substitute for onanism as maintained by Freud in his _Traumdeutung_ (2nd edition, p. 193), for the teeth and the male genital (Bub-boy) are brought in certain relations even in the popular saying. On the evening of the same day I therefore read the passage in question in the _Traumdeutung_, and found there among other things the statements which will be quoted in a moment, the influence of which on my dream is as plainly recognisable as the influence of the two above-mentioned experiences. Freud writes concerning dreams of dental irritation that ‘in the case of men nothing else than cravings for masturbation from the time of puberty furnishes the motive power for these dreams,’ p. 193. Further, ‘I am of the opinion that the frequent modifications of the typical dream of dental irritation—that _e.g._ of another person drawing the tooth from the dreamer’s mouth—are made intelligible by means of the same explanation. It may seem problematic, however, how “dental irritation” can arrive at this significance.
I here call attention to the transference from below to above (in the dream in question from the lower to the upper jaw), which occurs so frequently, which is at the service of sexual repression, and by means of which all kinds of sensations and intentions occurring in hysteria which ought to be enacted in the genitals can be realised upon less objectionable parts of the body,’ p. 194. ‘But I must also refer to another connection contained in an idiomatic expression. In our country there is in use an indelicate designation for the act of masturbation, namely: To pull one out, or to pull one down,’ p. 195, 2nd edition. This expression had been familiar to me in early youth as a designation for onanism, and from here on it will not be difficult for the experienced dream interpreter to get access to the infantile material which may lie at the basis of this dream. I only wish to add that the facility with which the tooth in the dream came out, and the fact that it became transformed after coming out into an upper incisor, recalls to me an experience of childhood when I myself easily and painlessly pulled out one of my wobbling front teeth.
This episode, which I can still to this day distinctly remember with all its details, happened at the same early period in which my first conscious attempts at onanism began—(Concealing Memory). The reference of Freud to an assertion of C. G. Jung that dreams of dental irritation in women signify parturition (footnote p. 194), together with the popular belief in the significance of toothache in pregnant women, has established an opposition between the feminine significance and the masculine (puberty). In this connection I recall an earlier dream which I dreamed soon after I was discharged by the dentist after the treatment, that the gold crowns which had just been put in fell out, whereupon I was greatly chagrined in the dream on account of the considerable expense, concerning which I had not yet stopped worrying. In view of a certain experience this dream now becomes comprehensible as a commendation of the material advantages of masturbation when contrasted with every form of the economically less advantageous object-love (gold crowns are also Austrian gold coins). Theoretically this case seems to show a double interest. First it verifies the connection revealed by Freud, inasmuch as the ejaculation in the dream takes place during the act of tooth-pulling. For no matter in what form a pollution may appear, we are obliged to look upon it as a masturbatic gratification which takes place without the help of mechanical excitation. Moreover the gratification by pollution in this case does not take place, as is usually the case, through an imaginary object, but it is without an object; and, if one may be allowed to say so, it is purely autoerotic, or at most it perhaps shows a slight homosexual thread (the dentist).
The second point which seems to be worth mentioning is the following: The objection is quite obvious that we are seeking here to validate the Freudian conception in a quite superfluous manner, for the experiences of the reading itself are perfectly sufficient to explain to us the content of the dream. The visit to the dentist, the conversation with the lady, and the reading of the _Traumdeutung_ are sufficient to explain why the sleeper, who was also disturbed during the night by toothache, should dream this dream, it may even explain the removal of the sleep-disturbing pain (by means of the presentation of the removal of the painful tooth and simultaneous over-accentuation of the dreaded painful sensation through libido). But no matter how much of this assumption we may admit, we cannot earnestly maintain that the readings of Freud’s explanations have produced in the dreamer the connection of the tooth-pulling with the act of masturbation; it could not even have been made effective had it not been for the fact, as the dreamer himself admitted (‘to pull one off’) that this association had already been formed long ago. What may have still more stimulated this association in connection with the conversation with the lady is shown by a later assertion of the dreamer that while reading the _Traumdeutung_ he could not, for obvious reasons, believe in this typical meaning of dreams of dental irritation, and entertained the wish to know whether it held true for all dreams of this nature. The dream now confirms this at least for his own person, and shows him why he had to doubt it. The dream is therefore also in this respect the fulfilment of a wish; namely, to be convinced of the importance and stability of this conception of Freud.
I have published a typical example of such a veiled Oedipus dream in No. 1 of the _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_; another with a detailed analysis was reported in the same journal, No. IV., by Otto Rank. Indeed the ancients were not unfamiliar with the symbolic interpretation of the open Oedipus dream (see O. Rank,[108] p. 534); thus a dream of sexual relations with the mother has been transmitted to us by Julius Cæsar which the oneiroscopists interpreted as a favourable omen for taking possession of the earth (Mother-earth). It is also known that the oracle declared to the Tarquinii that that one of them would become ruler of Rome who should first kiss the mother (_osculum, matri tulerit_), which Brutus conceived as referring to the mother-earth (_terram osculo contigit, scilicet quod ea communia mater omnium mortalium esset_, Livius, I., lxi.). These myths and interpretations point to a correct psychological knowledge. I have found that persons who consider themselves preferred or favoured by their mothers manifest in life that confidence in themselves and that firm optimism which often seems heroic and brings about real success by force. Footnote CQ: It is only of late that I have learned to value the significance of fancies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain the explanation of the curious fear felt by so many people of being buried alive, as well as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after death which represents nothing but a projection into the future of this mysterious life before birth. _The act of birth, moreover, is the first experience with fear, and is thus the source and model of the emotion of fear._
Footnote CR: For such a dream see Pfister: “Ein Fall von Psychoanalytischer Seelensorge und Seelenheilung,” _Evangelische Freiheit_, 1909. Concerning the symbol of “saving” see my lecture, “Die Zukünftigen Chancen der psychoanalytischen Therapie,” _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, No. I., 1910. Also “Beiträge zur Psychologie des Liebeslebens, I. Ueber einen besonderen Typus der objektwahl beim Manne,” _Jahrbuch_, Bleuler-Freud, vol. ii., 1910. Footnote CS: _Cf._ the works of Bleuler and of his pupils Maeder, Abraham, and others of the Zürich school upon symbolism, and of those authors who are not physicians (Kleinpaul and others), to which they refer. Footnote CT: In this country the President, the Governor, and the Mayor often represent the father in the dream. (Translator.) Footnote CU: I may here repeat what I have said in another place (“Die Zukünftigen Chancen der psychoanalytischen Therapie,” _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, I., No. 1 and 2, 1910): “Some time ago I learned that a psychologist who is unfamiliar with our work remarked to one of my friends that we are surely over-estimating the secret sexual significance of dreams. He stated that his most frequent dream was of climbing a stairway, and that there was surely nothing sexual behind this. Our attention having been called to this objection, we directed our investigations to the occurrence of stairways, stairs, and ladders in the dream, and we soon ascertained that stairs (or anything analogous to them) represent a definite symbol of coitus. The basis for this comparison is not difficult to find; under rhythmic intervals and with increasing difficulty in breathing one reaches to a height, and may come down again in a few rapid jumps. Thus the rhythm of coitus is recognisable in climbing stairs. Let us not forget to consider the usage of language. It shows us that the “climbing” or “mounting” is, without further addition, used as a substitutive designation of the sexual act. In French the step of the stairway is called “_la marche_”; “_un vieux marcheur_” corresponds exactly to our “an old climber.””
Footnote CV: In this country where the word “necktie” is almost exclusively used, the translator has also found it to be a symbol of a burdensome woman from whom the dreamer longs to be freed—“necktie—something tied to my neck like a heavy weight—my fiancée,” are the associations from the dream of a man who eventually broke his marriage engagement. Footnote CW: In spite of all the differences between Scherner’s conception of dream symbolism and the one developed here, I must still assert that Scherner[58] should be recognised as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams, and that the experience of psychoanalysis has brought his book into honourable repute after it had been considered fantastic for about fifty years. Footnote CX: From “Nachträge zur Traumdeutung,” _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, I., No. 5 and 6, 1911. Footnote CY: “Beiträge zur Traumdeutung,” _Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyt. und psychop. Forsch._, Bd. I., 1909, p. 473. Here also (p. 475) a dream is reported in which a hat with a feather standing obliquely in the middle symbolises the (impotent) man. Footnote CZ: _Cf._ _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, I. Footnote DA: Or chapel-vagina. Footnote DB: Symbol of coitus. Footnote DC: Mons veneris. Footnote DD: Crines pubis. Footnote DE: Demons in cloaks and capucines are, according to the explanation of a man versed in the subject, of a phallic nature.
The same analysis and synthesis of syllables—a veritable chemistry of syllables—serves us for many a jest in waking life. “What is the cheapest method of obtaining silver? You go to a field where silver-berries are growing and pick them; then the berries are eliminated and the silver remains in a free state.” The first person who read and criticised this book made the objection to me—which other readers will probably repeat—“that the dreamer often appears too witty.” That is true, as long as it applies to the dreamer; it involves a condemnation only when its application is extended to the interpreter of the dream. In waking reality I can make very little claim to the predicate “witty”; if my dreams appear witty, this is not the fault of my individuality, but of the peculiar psychological conditions under which the dream is fabricated, and is intimately connected with the theory of wit and the comical. The dream becomes witty because the shortest and most direct way to the expression of its thoughts is barred for it: the dream is under constraint. My readers may convince themselves that the dreams of my patients give the impression of being witty (attempting to be witty), in the same degree and in a greater than my own. Nevertheless this reproach impelled me to compare the technique of wit with the dream activity, which I have done in a book published in 1905, on _Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious_. (Author.)
Footnote DP: Lasker died of progressive paralysis, that is of the consequences of an infection caught from a woman (lues); Lasalle, as is well known, was killed in a duel on account of a lady. Footnote DQ: In the case of a young man who was suffering from obsessions, but whose intellectual functions were intact and highly developed, I recently found the only exception to this rule. The speeches which occurred in his dreams did not originate in speeches which he had heard or had made himself, but corresponded to the undisfigured wording of his obsessive thoughts, which only came to his consciousness in a changed state while he was awake. Footnote DR: Psychic intensity, value, and emphasis due to the interest of an idea are, of course, to be kept distinct from sensational intensity, and from intensity of that which is conceived. Footnote DS: Since I consider this reference of dream disfigurement to the censor as the essence of my dream theory, I here insert the latter portion of a story “Traumen wie Wachen” from _Phantasien eines Realisten_, by Lynkus, Vienna, (second edition, 1900), in which I find this chief feature of my theory reproduced:— “Concerning a man who possesses the remarkable quality of never dreaming nonsense....” “Your marvellous characteristic of dreaming as you wake is based upon your virtues, upon your goodness, your justice, and your love for truth; it is the moral clearness of your nature which makes everything about you intelligible.”
“But if you think the matter over carefully,” replied the other, “I almost believe that all people are created as I am, and that no human being ever dreams nonsense! A dream which is so distinctly remembered that it can be reproduced, which is therefore no dream of delirium, _always_ has a meaning; why, it cannot be otherwise! For that which is in contradiction with itself can never be grouped together as a whole. The fact that time and space are often thoroughly shaken up detracts nothing from the real meaning of the dream, because neither of them has had any significance whatever for its essential contents. We often do the same thing in waking life; think of the fairy-tale, of many daring and profound phantastic creations, about which only an ignorant person would say: ‘That is nonsense! For it is impossible.’” “If it were only always possible to interpret dreams correctly, as you have just done with mine!” said the friend. “That is certainly not an easy task, but the dreamer himself ought always to succeed in doing it with a little concentration of attention.... You ask why it is generally impossible? Your dreams seem to conceal something secret, something unchaste of a peculiar and higher nature, a certain mystery in your nature which cannot easily be revealed by thought; and it is for that reason that your dreaming seems so often to be without meaning, or even to be a contradiction. But in the profoundest sense this is by no means the case; indeed it cannot be true at all, for it is always the same person, whether he is asleep or awake.”
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.